Trayvon Martin’s parents,
Tracy Martin (R) and Sybrina
Fulton, arrive in court
with attorney Crump on
June 20, 2013, for George
Zimmerman’s trial in Sanford.

REUTERS/Gary W. Green

spectator seats, witness box and bench of
the firm’s full-size courtroom replica where
its attorneys and witnesses practice for
trial. The “museum,” as Crump’s longtime
assistant, Jennifer Morgan, describes the
gallery of press clippings, also includes
photos of the two firm partners with three
Florida governors and two presidents—
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

In 20 years of practice, Crump hasbeen named one of The National TrialLawyers’ Top 100 Lawyers and one of

Ebony magazine’s “Power 100,” which
honors influential African-Americans. He’s
received the NAACP Thurgood Marshall
Award and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference Martin Luther King
Servant Leader Award. And his numerous
seven-figure wins on behalf of clients have
earned him a spot in the Multi-Million
Dollar Advocates Forum.

Crump remains humble about it all. Hepauses to say grace over a takeout order ofChick-fil-A nuggets and fries, and credits ahigher power with his success.“A certain part of it is just doing the rightthing—and when you do the right thing, Godjust kind of takes over from there,” he says.“Ben tends to be the type of lawyer thatcertainly tries to put the person’s bestinterests first,” says the firm’s co-founderand managing partner, Daryl Parks.

On the wall of Crump’s office, an image
of Justice Marshall illustrates a framed
article that Crump wrote for the Florida
State University paper. And on the table
in front of Crump lies Gilbert King’s book

Devil in the Grove, about Marshall’s defenseof four black men falsely accused of rapinga white woman in Lake County.

“I’ve always considered myself
somewhat of a civil rights attorney,
because I want to believe I was cut from
the mold of Thurgood Marshall at my
inception,” says Crump, who is a past vice
president and, starting in July, president of
the National Bar Association.

He spent his early years in subsidizedhousing in a poor town in tobacco countrynear Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His singlemother worked by day at a Converse shoefactory and by night as a hotel maid. “Mymother was smart,” he says. “She instilled inus early on that education was the way out.”When Crump turned 12, his mother felthe would have better opportunities livingwith his stepfather in Plantation. He avoidedthe drug dealers who wanted youngerkids to be their lookouts, studied hard andearned a scholarship to FSU. He majoredin criminal justice, bore the brunt of hisfraternity brothers’ jokes for not drinking (hestill doesn’t), and met his future law partnerwhile they were both undergraduates.Crump was president of the blackstudent union for two terms; Parks wasalso a two-term student governmentpresident at predominantly black FloridaA&M University. They met when the twoschools worked together on studentgovernment activities. Then Crump andParks got into FSU’s law school.

“First thing every kid in the projects says
when they make it out and they do good is
they’re going to buy their mother a house,”
he says. “I was blessed: Within the first 12
months of our practice, we did pretty good
and I bought my mother a house.”

National attention came with the case of
Martin Lee Anderson a decade later. The
14-year-old African-American died after
a beating by guards in a Florida juvenile
detention “boot camp,” as a nurse stood
by and watched. Crump won a settlement
of more than $7 million for the boy’s family